Subject: ENG2603
Student: Elzaan Venter
Student No: 62913190
Unique number: 753213
Contact details: +27 788047813
Email:
, Essay
In my essay I will first give a brief explanation and background on the author of
this play, and then I will discuss how gender contributed to the tensions that
are manifested within the Youngers.
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born on the 19 May 1930. She was a playwright
and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play
performed on Broadway. Her best known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun,
highlights the lives of Black Americans living under racial
segregation in Chicago. At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics'
Circle Award — making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth
woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had
struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 US
Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist
newspaper Freedom, where she dealt with other intellectuals such as Paul
Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of her work during this time concerned
the African struggles for liberation and their impact on the world. Hansberry's
writings also discussed her lesbianism and the oppression of homosexuality.
She died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34. Hansberry inspired the song
by Nina Simone entitled "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", which was also the
title of Hansberry's autobiographical play.
The play takes place in Chicago’s South Side during the mid-twentieth Century.
It resolves around the lives of the Youngers, their dreams, the racial tension,
and the gender issues that plague the family. A Raisin in the Sun anticipates the
massive changes in gender relations – principally, the rise of feminism and the
Sexual Revolution – that would transform American life in the 1960s.
Hansberry explores controversial issues like abortion (which was illegal in
1959), the value of marriage, and morphing gender roles for women and men.
Each of the Youngers takes a different attitude towards shifting gender roles,
and the characters’ perspectives shed light on their identities. Beneatha, who
Hansberry said was partly based on herself, holds the most modern views,
pursuing her dream to become a doctor (a male-dominated profession at the
time) and telling a shocked Mama and Ruth that she isn’t concerned about
Student: Elzaan Venter
Student No: 62913190
Unique number: 753213
Contact details: +27 788047813
Email:
, Essay
In my essay I will first give a brief explanation and background on the author of
this play, and then I will discuss how gender contributed to the tensions that
are manifested within the Youngers.
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born on the 19 May 1930. She was a playwright
and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play
performed on Broadway. Her best known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun,
highlights the lives of Black Americans living under racial
segregation in Chicago. At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics'
Circle Award — making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth
woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had
struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 US
Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist
newspaper Freedom, where she dealt with other intellectuals such as Paul
Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of her work during this time concerned
the African struggles for liberation and their impact on the world. Hansberry's
writings also discussed her lesbianism and the oppression of homosexuality.
She died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34. Hansberry inspired the song
by Nina Simone entitled "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", which was also the
title of Hansberry's autobiographical play.
The play takes place in Chicago’s South Side during the mid-twentieth Century.
It resolves around the lives of the Youngers, their dreams, the racial tension,
and the gender issues that plague the family. A Raisin in the Sun anticipates the
massive changes in gender relations – principally, the rise of feminism and the
Sexual Revolution – that would transform American life in the 1960s.
Hansberry explores controversial issues like abortion (which was illegal in
1959), the value of marriage, and morphing gender roles for women and men.
Each of the Youngers takes a different attitude towards shifting gender roles,
and the characters’ perspectives shed light on their identities. Beneatha, who
Hansberry said was partly based on herself, holds the most modern views,
pursuing her dream to become a doctor (a male-dominated profession at the
time) and telling a shocked Mama and Ruth that she isn’t concerned about
